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Emile comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong
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Was Kant implicitly using UDT?
Consider Kant's categorical imperative. It says, roughly, that you should act such that you could will your action as a universal law without undermining the intent of the action. For example, suppose you want to obtain a loan for a new car and never pay it back - you want to break a promise. In a world where everyone broke promises, the social practice of promise keeping wouldn't exist and thus neither would the practice of giving out loans. So you would undermine your own ends and thus, according to the categorical imperative, you shouldn't get a loan without the intent to pay it back.
Another way to put Kant's position would be that you should choose such that you are choosing for all other rational agents. What does UDT tell you to do? It says (among other things) that you should choose such that you are choosing for every agent running the same decision algorithm as yourself. It wouldn't be a stretch to call UDT agents rational. So Kant thinks we should be using UDT! Of course, Kant can't draw the conclusions he wants to draw because no human is actually using UDT. But that doesn't change the decision algorithm Kant is endorsing.
Except... Kant isn't a consequentialist. If the categorical imperative demands something, it demands it no matter the circumstances. Kant famously argued that lying is wrong, period. Even if the fate of the world depends on it.
So Kant isn't really endorsing UDT, but I thought the surface similarity was pretty funny.
I remember Eliezer saying something similar, though I can't find it right now (the closest I could find was this ). It was something about the benefits of being the kind of person that doesn't lie, even if the fate of the world is at stake. Because if you aren't, the minute the fate of the world is at stake is the minute your word becomes worthless.
I recall it too. I think the key distinction is that if the choice was literally between lying and everyone in the world - including yourself - perishing, Kant would let us all die. Eliezer would not. What I took Eliezer to be saying (working from memory, I may try to find the post later) is that if you think the choice is between lying and the sun exploding (or something analogous) in any real life situation... you're wrong. It's far more likely that you're rationalizing the way you're compromising your values than that it's actually necessary to compromise your values, given what we know about humans. So a consequentialist system implies basically deontological rules once human nature is taken into account.
Once again, this is all from my memory, so I could be wrong.
Although Eliezer didn't put it precisely in these terms, he was sort of suggesting that if one could self-modify in such a way that it became impossible to break a certain sort of absolutely binding promise, it would be good to modify oneself in that way, even though it would mean that if the situation actually came up where you had to break the promise or let the world perish, you would have to let the world perish.
I think the article you (and the parent comment) are talking about is this one